Kurfürstendamm began as a dirt track connecting a royal castle to a hunting lodge. In the 1880s, Bismarck decided that wasn't good enough and ordered it rebuilt as Berlin's answer to the Champs-Élysées. It was 53 metres wide and lined with five-storey buildings crowned by fanciful domes. The result was the preferred address of Prussia's upper middle class.

Then came the twentieth century. Nazi SA troops rioted along its length in 1931, attacking people they thought looked Jewish. In 1968, student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head just outside his office on the boulevard. And on the night the Wall fell in 1989, thousands of East Berliners poured in, many heading straight here to stare at the glittering shop windows of Western capitalism.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace these violent and euphoric turning points along Ku'damm, connecting the boulevard's Bismarckian ambitions to the Cold War years when this street, quite literally, was West Berlin.